To Whom It May Concern:

The University of Massachusetts hosted a very problematic lecture earlier this month.

Lecturer Alice Rothchild, MD was invited by the student group UMMS Physicians for Human Rights (PHR). PHR announced and advertised her upcoming lecture, whereupon it was suggested to the group that Rothchild, rather than being an appropriate speaker on human rights in the middle east, is a known political activist on the very controversial issue she planned to discuss: the inflammatory poster PHR had been distributing, it was explained, betrayed her propagandistic agenda. In response, PHR agreed to modify the poster, but refused to consider rescinding the invitation to Dr. Rothchild.

Rothchild arrived at UMass the evening of her lecture and displayed on the first lecture slide the title of her talk: "Health and Human Rights consequences of Occupation and Violence on Israelis and Palestinians: Focusing on the West Bank and Gaza." After displaying the advertised title of her lecture, Rothchild explained: "We have a lot of information about the Israeli part of the narrative," and that she would "only be discussing the suffering of the Palestinians." In so doing, she was testifying to her propagandistic motives; she would not be lecturing on what she had ostensibly planned to talk about, and would focus only on her political agenda.

Rothchild's intellectual dishonesty alone should have upset every attendee of this talk: the speaker blatantly titled her talk in a misleading way. And although the leaders of UMass PHR had been warned in advance that her title was likely not reflective of what she would discuss, they let her speak anyway.

The actual content of her talk, however, was even more misleading. A human rights activist purports to care about the human rights issues of a population, and considers the factors which serve to enhance or restrict access to health care. On the contrary, someone who targets a single country for its actions, obscuring what is a much more complicated context, is a political activist, not a human rights worker, and should be presented as such (the complicated context of the Palestinian human rights situation must include: the ways in which Israel has improved Palestinian health; the role of other countries, who are very much responsible for the horrific state of human rights in the Palestinian territories; and most importantly, the responsibility of Palestinian leadership itself, as well as the reasons why Israel has felt it necessary, for the safety of its people, to restrict Palestinian traffic). Other examples of her duplicity include the following:

• Rothchild mislead by exaggeration, talking about how people cannot "leave their homes for a month." Except for wanted criminals on house arrest, Palestinians are not cooped up in their own houses. She must have meant "leave their cities." There is a big difference.
• Rothchild mislead by deceptively using the passive voice to further her agenda: she would use this technique to imply that all sorts of crimes were committed by Israel (a person attacked, a home riddled with bullet-holes, a cancelled vaccination program), without evidence to support the specious intimation that Israel was at responsible.
• She mislead with inaccurate, politically-charged terminology: continually referring to "Jewish-only bypass roads," Rothchild was trying to further her political agenda (there are, in fact, no such roads-there are only Israeli bypass roads, which afford freedom of movement to any Israeli, be they Arab, Christian, Druze, Jewish, etc.; She changed her rhetoric when confronted with this fact).
• She mislead with visual propaganda: she showed a photograph of disgusting anti-Arab graffiti in Hebron. She called it "disgusting." Later, she showed a photograph of disgusting anti-Israel and anti-Semitic graffiti on the security barrier. She called it "understandable."
• She mislead with unsubstantiated anecdotes: Dr. Rothchild retold stories she had heard about terrible treatment of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, which were unsupported by evidence and which were designed to emotionally manipulate her audience. She never cited the extensive research or literature on the frequency of such incidents or how the perpetrators were then subjected to court martial, nor did she offer any anecdotes of compassionate Israeli soldiers. All of this was decidedly subjective and unscientific.
• She mislead with inaccurate statements, declaring that "more and more settlements are being built" even though "there is a freeze on new settlements." The truth is that Israel has agreed to refrain from building new settlements, and the building activity she refers to is legal expansion due to growth of existing settlements.

Other evidence of her inappropriate, inflammatory, and inaccurate agenda include the following:

• When asked whether the security fence had been shown to reduce the number of suicide attacks, she stated that she didn't know of any research on the topic. If true, this is further evidence of her being uneducated on the topic (and unfit to lecture). Otherwise, it was disingenuous-there is extensive research looking at the impact of the barrier (and it shows a clear reduction in attacks due to the security fence).
• She described sociological problems such as children's tendency towards violence-"The only game the kid knew was to shoot"-and blamed Israel for it, without addressing the role that Palestinian society and education has played in creating and encouraging this problem. As has been clearly documented, Palestinian schools and children's television shows encourage violence. She made no mention of this.
• Nowhere in her lecture did Rothchild condemn Palestinian suicide attacks or other forms of terrorism; on the contrary, she mentioned the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade group only in the context of internecine, intra-Palestinian conflict (Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade has been designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. Department of State). It was only when confronted during the Q&A session (after her lecture) that she finally made mention of bombings being disagreeable to her.
• Similarly, she failed to mention Israel's security concerns during her lecture, yet did blame Israel for not allowing Palestinian students to study in Israel at will or use Israeli hospitals whenever they need. Never did she mention the fact that for years Palestinians had open access to Israeli hospitals, and that this policy changed only recently due to security concerns and suicide terrorism. Moreover, she neglected to mention the adverse effects Palestinian terrorism has had on Israeli access to health care: for example all persons and vehicles (including ambulances) are delayed entry to the hospital before a thorough security check is performed-even in emergencies.
• Rothchild advertised herself as a human rights worker, yet she declared: "the impact of settlements on Palestinians is part of the disease process." This was not her misspeaking-in an article Rothchild distributed at her lecture, she favorably quoted a Palestinian mental health worker who claimed that the "chronic disease of Palestinian life" is unwanted Jews living in Palestinian-claimed territories. Anyone who supports referring to a fellow class of human beings as a "chronic disease" has no commitment whatsoever to human rights and, indeed, is making a mockery of the concept. She should not be the guest of any self-respecting human rights organization, and UMass must condemn any speaker who employs such racist terminology.

These examples-and others which we have not mentioned in this letter-suggest that Dr. Rothchild is an activist not for human rights but for the Palestinian political cause. She presented political anti-Israel propaganda and whitewashed Palestinian human rights abuses rather than providing a valuable perspective on her advertised topic, "health and human rights consequences of the conflict on Israelis and Palestinians." As mentioned previously, in her very first sentence she admitted that she had no intention to discuss what she promised to discuss. And she referred to people as a disease.

Her use of a human rights forum to vilify Israel is inappropriate and the University must accept responsibility for having helped her do so. Nothing short of an official condemnation, clarification of policy, and call for an honest discussion of human rights issues will suffice.

Sincerely,

[snip]

I was only able to be there for 35 minutes of this evening's anti-israel exposition, so I'd ask you to phone [x] to get the full description of what transipred and what was said. In the short time I was there it was clear Dr. Rothchild was using some facts and much political propaganda to blame the entire palestinian question on the israelis and the "Jewish settlers". Every image of some poor palestinian was accompanied by a comment from her "...just think about what impact that has on this palestinian" and implicitly condoned homicide bombing (she never used "terrorism" to describe bombings, which she mentioned only in passing; only during the question answer session did she make clear she wasn't thrilled with suicide bombings, and even here her condemnation was halfhearted and backhanded: "some people accuse me of supporting bombings, and I don't support bombings" and continued with an horrific "what woud you do?" argument--so she not only refused to condemn terrorism outright--bringing up the Al aqsa martyrs brigade only in the context of internicine palestinian conflict [which she blamed on israel, BTW] and not in the context of-gasp-terrorism--she also used her images and facts to implicitly support the perfectly rational decision of a clear-thinking palestinian to strap explosives to him/herself and use his body to murder israeli schoolchildren). She also dragged out the old canards: checkpoints cause bombings, attacks on israeli civilians have only happened as a result of occupation ("bombings", she explained, "are a relatively new phenomenon"; this being a rare mention of bad stuff happening to israelis, but misleading to imply this is the only form of terrorism), separation wall causes bombings (on the Q & A [x], who was doing her best to counter the speaker's glaring factual omissions, asked her what she thought of the actual statistic which showed the wall having drastically reduced suicide bombings; Dr. Rothchild responded, "well, don't you think that might be due to other things, like Arafat's death? Your statistic does not mean there is a causative relationship!" whereupon wisely [x] said, "I'm just citing the statistic" which was a great moment). Oh, and she quoted favorably a palestinian who explained to her that the occupying jews are the "real disease affecting us" thereby re-creating the 1930's era imagery of yiddin as parasites. But there was so much more! I was only there for a small portion of her lecture and the Q & A...